Customer experience is evolving with technological advancements and increasing customer demand. If we go back a couple of decades, customers often weren’t seen as humans but merely as numbers. To get our queries resolved, we had to write emails and wait for days or months in some cases for them to get fixed. We’ve come a long way from writing emails and calling toll-free numbers to the now-instant support companies offered. With technological advancement, customer expectations are higher, and expected response times are decreasing. Today, it’s increasingly important to keep your customers happy and satisfied in a world full of options. This is where conversational marketing comes in.
Everything you need to know about conversational marketing
Before we jump into what conversational marketing is, we should discuss whether conversations are all that important to businesses in the first place.
Selling products and creating a brand sounds straightforward enough, but it’s much easier said than done in today’s marketplace. With all the tools at your disposal, it can get complicated fast—but there’s one resource that remains evergreen: conversation.
Every conversation is different. As a marketer or a sales professional, be careful not to flood your interactions with too much information. Find meaningful insights and communicate them effectively. This way, customers and prospects will get the idea while also enjoying their interactions with you.
Now, what is conversational marketing? It’s a customer-centric approach to marketing that involves having real-time conversations with potential and current customers. It helps companies add a human element to their brands and take visitors through the buyer journey in the most efficient way possible. Conversational marketing helps businesses increase their customer base and build and foster long-lasting relationships with them.
The three stages of conversational marketing
Listen
Remember: Listening is a powerful skill that you can’t afford to ignore. Listen to what your customers are saying without any preconceptions. This helps you focus on the facts rather than on preconceived notions. Conversational marketing revolves around customer-centricity, so it’s essential to value what your customer says, whether it’s feedback or a query.
Understand
The next step after listening to your customer is understanding. Analyze what the customer is trying to say, why it is important to them, and what they expect from you.
Respond
In the last step, it is important to close the loop. Act in the best possible interest of the customer, considering your organizational constraints. Acting quickly on the query/feedback is crucial to building a strong community of brand advocates.
Find the right channel and conversational tool for your products
Having great conversational skills can only get you so far. Digital media offer multiple avenues for conversational marketing or selling, and it’s vital to figure out what works best for you to increase your brand’s reach.
Your website
Your website is your business’s digital address. Well-written web pages can supply you with positive first impressions, but what if visitors still have questions? A customer having trouble with your product pricing expects a real-time resolution; otherwise, they’ll bounce off your website and head toward your competitor’s. Live chat is a great way to solve your visitor’s query quickly and convert your website traffic into potential leads.
Instant messaging channels
Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp are excellent ways to gain attention for your brand. And if you can’t do it alone, leverage influencers to extend your reach.
Some brands use social media messaging to send regular updates about their latest releases. You can use the responses you receive to analyze what your audience wants and how you can improve the overall customer experience.
Email campaigns
Emailing is one of the most straightforward attention-grabbing mechanisms available to businesses. With nearly 319 billion emails sent daily in 2021¹, it’s still the dominant mode of communication open to you and should be treated accordingly.
Send offers to keep customers coming back for more, and don’t forget that you can use your website’s live chat to collect email IDs (with express consent, of course).
Make it feel more human
Having a real-time conversation with your customer without understanding the context isn’t conversational marketing, so it’s not enough just to add any live chat tool on your website. Traditional chatbots can easily sound robotic, which affects how useful they are for you. Just take your time and remember that the people you deal with daily are humans. While using a bot as the first point of contact for visitors, remember that this will soon become a one-on-one talk. Make sure your bot has a personality; make it feel more human. And conversational bots are all about that—analyzing customer messages and providing human-like responses that reflect the conversation’s intent and context.
How can Zoho SalesIQ help you in conversational marketing?
With so many channels at your disposal to start engaging with your customers, you’ll be everywhere and still nowhere without the right tool. Zoho SalesIQ is a powerful yet easy-to-use conversational engagement software platform optimized to suit the needs of B2B and B2C businesses of all sizes. Unlock the true potential of your website by answering visitor queries around the clock—even when your marketing or sales team is asleep—using our NLP-driven chatbot. Whether it’s Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, or Telegram, Zoho SalesIQ brings all your IM channels into a single dashboard so you can manage your conversational marketing from a single screen without switching between multiple tabs.
Related resources: What is conversational AI and how to choose the best for your business?
References:
Emails sent per day 2025 | Statista. (2022). Retrieved 1 November 2022, from https://www.statista.com/statistics/456500/daily-number-of-e-mails-worldwide/#statisticContainer
Comments